Re: OT: light altering paint for greenhouses could help lengthen fruit growing season in the UK

Nov 24, 2024 Last reply: 1 year ago 4 Replies


Light-altering paint for greenhouses could help lengthen the fruit growing season in the UK


>
formatting link
Summary:
> New spray developed by scientists could help boost UK farming and increase the UK's food security.
>
> Paper:
>
formatting link

> stuff they use, quote:
> '
> In this paper, we develop an approach based on readily prepared and cheap
> Eu3+-containing polyoxotitanium cages (Eu-POTs) which, we show,
> possess the necessary design features listed before.
> Having established the ground rules for selective modification,
> we introduce a working prototype luminophore with high PLQY (>60%)
> which is soluble in a range of commercial plastics, including water-based
> acrylic paint that can be sprayed onto conventional glass greenhouses
> in an agricultural environment.

What you needed to say - and didn't - was that the luminophore absorbs wavelengths shorter than red, and re-emits the energy at a wavvelength in the red which is efficiently absorbed by plant chlorophyll.


The article talks about UV light - though there's not a lot of that in sunlight, and even less in English sunlight - so it's not exactly helpful.

There are other much older organic dye technologies that will down convert blue photons to red like dayglo dyes Eosin, Rhodamine, Rubrene etc (although some of them are a bit carcingenic others are quite harmless). They form the basis for pumped tunable dye lasers.

Plants are green because the very first photosynthetic life on earth had already grabbed the low hanging fruit of energetic green and blue photons using rhodopsin based proton pumps and red photosynthetic pigments. You can still see them living in rock pool puddles today.

formatting link
And a closely related pigment lives on in our eyes in various slightly different forms giving us colour vision.

Greenhouses will never grow much of the world's needed food.

But things keep getting better:

formatting link
More CO2 is part of the reason, which is why people pump CO2 into greenhouses.

<cough>

My dear fellow, did you not suggest only a short time ago that we both ignore this OP's off-topic nonsense? Just a little reminder....

Well, he posted someting interesting, in un-damaged English. Fooled me!

A little OT is OK with me now and then, if it's arguably interesting, science related, and not obnoxious.

Join the Discussion

Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.

Didn't find your answer?

Ask the community — no account required